Scientists Are Not Necessarily Boring

SO here is one of the sublime humor showed by one of the 20th century's great scientist - Albert Einstein.

In 1943 he answered a little girl who had difficulties in school with mathematics.

"…Do not worry about your difficulties in Mathematics. I can assure you mine are still greater.

Best regards
Professor Albert Einstein."

Yup, next time your children complaint about difficulties, answer in ala Einstein.

2 Gigs of Rubbish Thrown

Not rubbish exactly. Just some of the "oh-not-so-precious" stuff in my pictures collection. You know, everything comes in shades of grey, and there's no clear cut definition of what is needed is what is not. So at the end of the day, you always get all those "in-dilemma" pictures piled up in your computer until one day your computer is slogging slowly, only then you realised, oh sh*t! :-)

There is something in chinese common saying called "鸡肋: 食之无味, 弃之可惜". In a gross translation, it is "sternum muscles on chicken: bland to be eaten, wasteful if thrown". Yup, all these files are the sternum flesh, but I digress.

Basically, this is the first time I am not online for the whole night. So I was in a mood to dust out my old files, my grand 1.3 gig collection of grand dinner pics (out of which i was not in 99% of the pictures), my friends' pictures (again not in) and the list goes on. So I deleted some not-so-relevant and not-so-well-taken ones. SO I got 2 gig extra. Voila!

Failuphobia

So here begins my rambling talk again, though I am very sure that the passion won't last for more than 10 posts in this blog. But who cares, I will still write as long as the lukewarm interest is still flowing in my veins.

I just went off from an enlightening talk with one of my good friends Xuan Ni (a.k.a. Ah Kong), in which we talked about "kiasuism", a term originally coined from "kia su" which means "afraid of losing" in Hokkien dialect. Well, we happened to come to this topic and we admitted to being kiasu fellows. But then, as if to defend this characteristic normally disregarded in our society, we both said "Who is not kiasu anyway" in unison.

Kia su is normally perceived as "cowardy, selfish, not magnanimous nature of someone who is always comparing and competing with others, lest losing out to someone who was originally worse than himself". Hah, as it races across my mind, who is not afraid of losing out?

1. A child's reaction when his or her neighbour's child get the newest toy while he failed to get one? Wail.
2. A secondary school student's reaction when he missed out the top spot by 1 mark? Oppressed dissatisfaction. Or claiming for extra marks from the most gullible teacher.
   
3. An over-weight girl sees her crush flirting with a pretty girl. She checks out Atkin's diet.
   
4. An SPM student got straight 10 A1. Another SPM student get 12 A1 and 1A2. The Ministry of Education thinks the latter is a better student. The next day, fathers of them are found fighting on the street.
5. A woman past her menopause age found that her peer using SK-2 became fairer than her. She secretly gave up her Shiseido Whitening Cream which turned out to be a disaster. The next day her daughter was found at the nearest Giant's SK-2 counter.

Haha.. my arid creativity can't fabricate more examples now, but I am sure all above happens to every stratum of the society in every single day. So I think it is all too common in our ranks and files. It is not that bad anyway, we are all the same. Wrapping it up with 2 mantras:

• Be kiasu, but don't let others realise it.

• Be intelligent, but lead others into thinking that you are only half as intelligent than you really are.

I learnt that from Confucious.


p/s: The fact that I write blogs is sort of the manifestation of kiasuism too. :-)

Learner and Trainee

There is a stark difference between learning and training. Many are going to scoff at this, but just take it with a pinch of salt if you wish:

when your teachers tell you, "please ask others immediately whenever you have questions", they are actually hindering your progress of learning.

Throughout the years, I find myself learning stuff differently from some others; and though not intending to boast myself, more often than not I do master certain skills or discipline faster and more dexterously. Many take that as a sign of intelligence, but I can't single that as the only cause. Take an example, let's say the usage of a piece of a new instrument (computer, hi-fi, software or any other you can think of). When many people are confronted with a new computer, the spontaneous reaction is, "So what should I click on" or "What's next" or "Can I click on that button?". To say the least, this is the subliminal effect of our teacher's adage, ask before you do. Now, wrong, wrong, wrong! While this proved to be the safest way to work around the society and the greatest common denominator of public education, the principle is certainly not a good way of learning. SO what do many people do? They ask for steps, instructions at once, they get it, they practice and regurgitate the steps, and they think that they have LEARNT. Twist the situation a bit, they are shackled.

So this is the situation of our education system - mostly rote memorisation. Here in my beloved country Malaysia, the method is used exclusively in almost all subjects. Even in mathematics I happened to learn that some students tried to memorise all the possible question "types" and their respective "solutions" so that they would hit it in the exam. Sadly they are the ones who scored the worst in the exam. They are not to be mocked at, but I digress.

Going back to "learner vs trainee", to me the difference is a learner learns from his mistakes, while a trainee learns not to make mistakes. If I were to make an analogy, I would liken a learner as a mountaineer who scales the mountain by jungle paths, while a trainee as a traveller who ascends the mountain by climbing stairs. Yes, both of them do reach the acme; and yes, the mountaineer gets bruises and wounds. But at the end of the day, the disparity of skills between them is nothing less than obvious. And I am sure that the mountaineer will move on to conquer another peak.

Hence try to be a learner. I believe that I have always been one, in all my involvements.

Flickr is Cool

Get this, the only limit is 10Mb per month which is, errh~~ not so sufficient for shutter bug for me. Anyway, always resize it to 640 x 480 and you will end up with space sufficient for 140 pics per months. Not bad huh.


My Birthday wish? You know it if you know me well enough.

A Maths Nerd I am

Maths is built on a set of underlying foundations called axioms. Examples are like "the shortest distance between 2 points is the distance of the straight line connecting them". Euclid's Element elucidated a lot of geometry axioms. These axioms build the whole picture of Mathematics we know and learn today.

However, it is incomplete. There is no logical system which is self-containing, that is, there must be something which can't be explained by the system although the fact may be self-evident. Here is it, the famous Godel's Incompleteness Theorem:

The proof of Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem is so simple, and so sneaky, that it is almost embarassing to relate. His basic procedure is as follows:

1. Someone introduces Gödel to a UTM, a machine that is supposed to be a Universal Truth Machine, capable of correctly answering any question at all.
2. Gödel asks for the program and the circuit design of the UTM. The program may be complicated, but it can only be finitely long. Call the program P(UTM) for Program of the Universal Truth Machine.
3. Smiling a little, Gödel writes out the following sentence: "The machine constructed on the basis of the program P(UTM) will never say that this sentence is true." Call this sentence G for Gödel. Note that G is equivalent to: "UTM will never say G is true."
4. Now Gödel laughs his high laugh and asks UTM whether G is true or not.
5. If UTM says G is true, then "UTM will never say G is true" is false. If "UTM will never say G is true" is false, then G is false (since G = "UTM will never say G is true"). So if UTM says G is true, then G is in fact false, and UTM has made a false statement. So UTM will never say that G is true, since UTM makes only true statements.
6. We have established that UTM will never say G is true. So "UTM will never say G is true" is in fact a true statement. So G is true (since G = "UTM will never say G is true").
7. "I know a truth that UTM can never utter," Gödel says. "I know that G is true. UTM is not truly universal."

Think about it - it grows on you ...

With his great mathematical and logical genius, Gödel was able to find a way (for any given P(UTM)) actually to write down a complicated polynomial equation that has a solution if and only if G is true. So G is not at all some vague or non-mathematical sentence. G is a specific mathematical problem that we know the answer to, even though UTM does not! So UTM does not, and cannot, embody a best and final theory of mathematics ...

Although this theorem can be stated and proved in a rigorously mathematical way, what it seems to say is that rational thought can never penetrate to the final ultimate truth ... But, paradoxically, to understand Gödel's proof is to find a sort of liberation. For many logic students, the final breakthrough to full understanding of the Incompleteness Theorem is practically a conversion experience. This is partly a by-product of the potent mystique Gödel's name carries. But, more profoundly, to understand the essentially labyrinthine nature of the castle is, somehow, to be free of it.

An insight in Mathematics? Nothing is perfect, I would say.

2004 Interesting Headlines

2004 is over, but the cries of tsunami victims still resound throughout the world. May God bless them all.

This is a compilation of interesting headlines around the world. SO funny I laughed my hats off.